Q15 - The American legal system and the British legal system are quite different in some ways. Did you find this a challenge to deal with, especially for your American audience? Or did you feel comfortable assuming readers would follow along pretty easily?

A - I wrote Final Witness specifically for an American audience, and so I consciously tried to make the English settings and the courtroom scenes as accessible as possible. I did this by explaining things that are different without making it obvious that I was doing so.There is thus reference in my book to how the defendant felt intimidated by the barristers' wigs and gowns, and the defence counsel is described as wishing that the American system of jury selection applied in England so that he could get rid of a particularly nasty-looking juror. I also tried to keep the law as simple as possible. The courtroom scenes in Final Witness are about the evidence and not the law. The clash between a witness and cross-examining lawyer is of course the same on both sides of the Atlantic.